"Could you please supply evidence, as opposed to opinion? Would you like me to explain the difference to you, in order to assist you?
You could ask Gerda Lerner the distinguished scholar who wrote these words for her opinion. "(Lerner 6). For instance, during the Dark Ages women enjoyed wider literacy and access to education than men did, so the Dark Ages were probably only Dark for men." Of course some people are so rigid and biased that nothing can change them.
The Creation of Feminist Consciousness
From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy
Gerda Lerner
Oxford University Press, 1993
Gerda Lerner's two volume set, The Creation of Patriarchy and The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, have become classics in their own time. If you only have a little time to read, are interested in women's history, and are new to the study of women's history, these books are the place to start. If you are a beginning student of women's studies, these books provide indispensable information on which to build your understanding of patriarchy, feminist consciousness forming, and women's history. If you are an old hand at women's studies, take another look at these old favorites.
Lerner mentions many women who are still very obscure. You'll find plenty of names, such as Isotta Nogarola, Laura Cereta, Cassandra Fedele, Henricus Cornelus Agrippa, Lucretia Marinella, Anna Maria von Schurman, Rachel Speght, Ester Sowernam, Constantia Munda, Amelia Lanyer, Judith Drake, Judith Sargent Murray, to drop at the next women's studies conference; your colleagues will be amazed at your knowledge of obscure women. Lerner's bibliography alone is worth the price of this set; the breath and depth of her sources is staggering and the bibliography includes scores of works that would be welcome on any woman's bookshelf. Between the text and the bibliography, Lerner mentions the majority of the major feminist works written by women and men before the 19th century.
If you aim to create a library of feminist thought spanning the last six centuries, Lerner's books are indispensable for helping you create a "wish list" of books written prior to the last quarter of the 19th century. In short, these books belong on every woman's bookshelf and on the bookshelves of libraries across the country.
Scholarly and well-researched, the set provides a panoramic vision of women's history from ancient Assyria until the 1870s, a time when a sufficiently large number of women, at least in the United States, reached a high enough level of feminist consciousness to create the first organizations, such as the National Woman Suffrage Association, devoted to achieving rights for women as women. Believing in a prehistoric matriarchy and believing that patriarchy can be deconstructed only by reversing the process by which it was constructed, Lerner proposes in The Creation of Patriarchy a theory to explain the transformation of the early matriarchy into a patriarchy and discusses men's representation of women in history. In The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, the sequel to Patriarchy, Lerner discusses the rise of an anti-patriarchal feminist attitude among women from the middle ages to 1877, explains numerous techniques by which women, even in the most dangerous of times, subverted patriarchy to create a feminist space for themselves, introduces us to many wonderful, powerful, proto-feminist women, and discusses ways by which large groups of women came to see women qua women oppressed.
To Lerner, the historical silence about women's positive contributions to culture along with the severing of the relationship between women and the Divine in Jewish and Christian cultures are the fundamental pillars on which patriarchy rests. Women's thousand years of feminist commentary on the Bible -- re-visioning the Divine to include the female, as well as the male, and teaching the inherent dignity and worth of the female, as well as the male, of the human species -- was (and still is) fundamental to women reclaiming their ancient status of equality with men. Further, to Lerner, it was those religious arguments on the inherent dignity and worth of women which eventually lead to a true feminist conscientiousness among women.
In the Introduction, Lerner summarizes the major ideas in The Creation of Patriarchy wherein she had showed that the subjugation of women was the first form of institutionalized dominance and all other forms of dominance, such as class, race, and religion, grew out of men's control over women, women's sexuality, women's production, and women's reproduction. An elite male class arose on the excess-over-that-required-for-subsistence production of women and slaves. Because these few elite men were able to distribute these excess resources, thereby enriching and empowering their supporters, or, to withhold those resources, thereby impoverishing and disempowering their opponents, they were able to construct philosophical, scientific, and religious systems which reinforced their dominant position, in the process defining women as less than man, almost as a sub-human species, and excluding women from all sources of power.
Most importantly, women were deprived of their history, of the knowledge of women who came before them who had managed to become educated, to achieve, and to influence human affairs in spite of men's oppression, of the ideas their predecessors had used to struggle intellectually against the misogyny of their contemporary culture and of their inherited tradition, and of women's alternate interpretation of divine writ and definitions of truth and morality which placed women on par with men. In depriving women of their history, each woman had to think her way through patriarchy as if such ideas had never been thought before. Instead of being guided, strengthen, and challenged by her foremothers, thinking women were treated with condescension and derision, their ideas were mocked or ignored, their sense of self-worth and mastery shattered.
In each of the following chapters, arranged in chronological order, Lerner examines a technique which women used to create an intellectually rewarding climate for themselves by focusing on the lives of specific women. The chapter headings do actually summarize the contents of the chapters:
Chapter 2: The Educational Disadvantaging of Women - a documentation of the educational disadvantages of women throughout history and the consequences of this disadvantage on women's lives
Chapter 3: Self- authorization - women, mostly women religious, who authorized themselves to write in the early Christian period, the Carolingian period, and the medieval era with emphasis on Hildegard of Bingen
Chapter 4: The Way of the Mystics 1 - religious women, predominantly of the Roman Catholic Christian faith, who used their inspiration and visions to create a positive female spiritual space and mental emancipation by giving themselves the authority to think, speak, and write about their visions of God
Chapter 5: The Way of the Mystics 2 - religious women, predominantly of the Protestant Christian faith, who used their visions to reformulate Christian theology to a greater or lesser extent by developing a female God-language, by reconceptualizing the Godhead as both male and female, by insisting on woman's major role in redemption and salvation, and by formally criticizing biblical commentaries
Chapter 6: Authorization Through Motherhood - the concept of motherhood, as a way of both unifying women and authorizing them to think, speak, and write as women through their common experience as mothers, an experience that no man can ever have
Chapter 7: One Thousand Years of Feminist Bible Criticism - (the best chapter in the book) 1000 years of remarkable feminist commentaries on the Bible. Although Lerner uses this long tradition of criticism to illustrate the endless repetition of women's intellectual work because women's thoughts and ideas were not saved by one generation to be studied by the next, as were men's words, the chapter can as easily be used to illustrate the idea that women have been rejecting misogynist theology for the past millennia, despite enormous social pressure, almost complete intellectual isolation, severe personal financial consequences, extreme educational deprivations, and, at times, high risks of personal danger (like going to the stake as a heretic).
Chapter 8: Authorization Through Creativity - the women who used their creative writing to completely by-pass patriarchal thought, instead of engaging in anti-patriarchal thought
Chapter 9: The Right to Learn, the Right to Teach, the Right to Define - women's struggle for educational opportunity from the Renaissance to the 19th century
Chapter 10: Female Clusters, Female Networks, Social Spaces - the impact of women who have formed a group for some other purpose, such as charity, on the rise of feminist conscientiousness
Chapter 11: The Search for Women's History - women's efforts to write their own history for the last 500 years
Chapter 12: Conclusions - how men's relationship to the process of creating and writing history differs from that of women
pinn.net |
